Team 4 (50/50)
About Us Rachel Griffin Hi! My name is Rachel Griffin and I am a Senior at James Madison University. I'm majoring in Management with concentrations in Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, and European Business, and have minors in Economics and Environmental Studies. I am the Vice President of Finance and Administration for JMU's Net Impact Chapter, which focuses on social entrepreneurship, environmental sustainability, and corporate social responsibility. I am also a member of the College of Business Student Diversity Council, which studies diversity in different companies and tries to promote on-campus diversity. Last spring I studied abroad at the Universiteit Antwerpen in Antwerp, Belgium and had the time of my life traveling all around Europe! I'm really looking forward to getting involved in my Management classes this semester and becoming an Entrepreneur Extraordinaire! Bill Purdy My name is Bill Purdy and I am a senior at James Madison University. I am a Management Major with aconcentration in Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. From past work experiences and my time at JMU I have developed into a dedicated, hardworking individual with great communication and time management skills. I have many passions and ambitions in life and I strive to one day own and operate my own business. I am looking forward to the rest of my senior year expanding my knowledge, and becoming an entrepreneur extraordinaire. Ethan Dorton Hey, I am Ethan Dorton! I'm a senior at James Madison University, and I am majoring in Management with a concentration in Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. I am excited about becoming an Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, because that is what I want to be the rest of my life. I want my future job titles to either say Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Visionary, Innovator, or Chief Motivator. I am very optimistic person, I work really well in a team, I am great at building off of others ideas, and I work hard to achieve my goals. My ultimate goal in life is to be successful enough to start my own VC firm, and help other entrepreneurs achieve their goals and dreams. Until then, I look forward to learning the entrepreneurship process and hopefully one day mastering it! Getting Started At first we were struggling to come up with a product that people could benefit from and also one that people would want to buy. We then decided to go along a social entrepreneurship route and make a product that would benefit society!! We decided to create a business model where we would sell a product and donate 50% of the profits to a specific charity. We thought that people would be willing to spend more money on a product if they knew that the money they were spending was going towards a good cause. We interviewed a lot of people about what charity they would want their money to go to. Although we got many great answers and ideas, there was overwhelming support for cancer research. We agreed with this cause and decided that we would start out selling a product for cancer research! At first, we debated on what product to sell - we were thinking either water bottles or sunglasses. The sunglasses idea we got from some customer discovery questions. One girl told us that if she was at a football game and forgot her sunglasses, she would definitely be inclined to buy a pair - especially if they were in support of a good cause! Eventually, we decided to go with sunglasses at first due to customer discovery and the fact that we could order them in smaller quantities, just in case we couldn't sell them all. First Sales and Product Expansion We began selling our sunglasses at football games. We also continued customer discovery in our early sales and got great feedback! We decided to choose the American Cancer Society as the charity that we would donate to. We also realized that people wanted to donate money to our causes, either in addition to or in lieu of purchasing sunglasses. We were happy to receive donations from everyone and are donating that straight to the charity. We were pretty successful our first day of selling, managing to sell 12 pairs and raise $17 additional dollars in donations! Our original sunglass design was the standard wayfarer frame in many different colors. Since this is JMU, we definitely experienced the most success with purple and yellow sunglasses. After our first successful day of selling, we needed to purchase more inventory and we also decided to try to expand our styles of sunglasses. We did some customer discovery and found that people might be interested in an aviator design and a girl-vintage style. In order to get these in for the next game, we had to put a rush order on them, which unfortunately raised our costs a little bit. We went to sell these new sunglasses at the next football game and again had great success with the wayfarers. We had a little bit of success with the aviators and almost none at all with the girl-vintage style. This was a major setback for us, but at least the wayfarers were doing well enough that we were able to profit from our sunglasses venture. Girl vintage.jpg|Girl-vintage style Aviator.jpg|Aviator style Wayfarer.jpg|Wayfarer style Mercy House We knew that after the success of our sunglasses sales we wanted to expand our product line and potentially set up a one-for-one model where for every product we would sell, we would donate one of the same product to charity. We therefore set up a meeting with the director of the Mercy House, Twila Lee. We asked her for potential ideas on what kinds of items we could sell that the Mercy House needs that people would also want to purchase for themselves. She had a lot of great ideas, but the one that we liked the most was to sell scarves and gloves for the upcoming winter, and in our one-for-one model, we could donate the scarves and gloves as holiday presents for the people that the Mercy House helps! She also told us that the Mercy House owns two thrift stores nearby and that we could use them as another channel with which to sell our products. Twila also told us about a imprinting shop that we could use and she thought they might give us a discount if we were working with the Mercy House. When we left this meeting with the Mercy House, we were feeling great about this new partnership. Unfortunately, this feeling didn't last very long. We tried to contact the person that Twila told us to call for the thrift store partnership, but never heard back. We called and emailed him and left multiple messages, but we still didn't hear back. We also tried to look up the imprinting shop that Twila told us about, but we were unable to find it online. It was starting to look like we would have to find a new direction to go in. Hurricane Sandy On October 29th, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit most of the East Coast of the United States and caused particular damage to the New York/New Jersey area. Many people lost power for weeks and had a lot of their property destroyed and flooded. The devastation was so much, we knew that this was a need we had to start working towards. This was especially important to our group, because one of our members, Bill, is from New Jersey and experienced the destruction first hand. We knew that the American Red Cross was doing a lot to help and needed donations to continue to provide aid. We decided that we wanted to sell T-Shirts and donate half of the profits to the American Red Cross in order to help their relief efforts. Our plan was to get to designing shirts to sell and get them printed right away.